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Introduction

This collection of Liszt’s transcriptions completes 35 compact discs of the present series. This repertoire of insightful reworkings of other composers’ music covers three distinct areas of Liszt’s endeavour: piano scores of large-scale chamber works, transcriptions from sacred choral works, and some elaborations of secular choruses (this last group not including the Schubert Gondelfahrer, which will appear later in the series alongside Liszt’s other Schubert transcriptions).

The transcription of Beethoven’s popular Septet belongs in character with Liszt’s transcriptions of the Beethoven Symphonies. By the time he came to make his partition de piano of the Septet Liszt had already produced Beethoven’s Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies for piano solo (in their first versions). His aims in the Septet, although not formally described on this occasion with a statement of intention by way of a preface, are evidently the same: to reproduce faithfully the letter of Beethoven’s text in a manner whereby the colours of the piano can do duty for the original spirit of the instrumental sound. Beethoven’s original piece, one of his early great commercial successes, dates from the same period as his First Symphony, and the writing is very often orchestral. The original scoring (clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass) allows for a mixture of textures, including concertante passages for the violin and quite a number of contrasted instrumental solos with the rest of the group acting as an accompanying band. Liszt’s approach encompasses everything from the orchestral gravity of the opening to the delicate whimsy of the solos in the variation movement. As if to emphasize the seriousness of the introduction, Liszt lowers the whole first chord by an octave, and he allows Beethoven’s repeated chords before the Allegro to move up through an arpeggio to arrive at a warmer sound for the transition chord. Typical of his efforts to make pianistic sense without violating the original is his inverting of the accompanying viola figure at the beginning of the Allegro; thirds are replaced by sixths, but throughout extraordinary attention is devoted to preserving as many of the original lines as possible, with the customary disregard for the level of pianistic difficulty entailed. As with the transcriptions of the Symphonies, Liszt labels all the important entries with their original instrumentation for those who might not have access to Beethoven’s score. So the opening theme of the slow movement – which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Menuetto of the Opus 31 No 3 Pianoforte Sonata – is marked as being scored for clarinet. The third movement does, of course, derive from the Minuet of the early Pianoforte Sonata Opus 49 No 2, although its rhythm has grown spikier. The theme and variations (five of them, plus coda) turns out to be remarkably pianistic, and Liszt’s simplified alternative passages may be by-passed. The same cannot be said of the Scherzo, where Liszt’s version of what are straightforward repeated notes on the violin turn the piece into a veritable study. (Two wrong notes in the bass at the mid-point of the Trio look like slips of the pen, and have been corrected here to agree with Beethoven’s text.) Liszt gives two versions of the violin cadenza in the finale but, since the alternative one agrees closely to the single-line violin part and the one in the main text is more imaginative with its cascades of first inversion triads, the choice is clear

Probably as much for its being the harbinger of Mozart’s death as for its intrinsic value, Mozart’s last unfinished masterpiece, the Requiem, exercised the minds of many nineteenth-century composers, and its influence upon all of the great Requiem settings from Cherubini through Berlioz, Liszt, Verdi, Dvorvák and Fauré and on to many more recent works has been incalculable. Liszt confines himself to very clean accounts of the last two portions of the Sequenz: the powerful Confutatis, and the Lacrimosa, of which the textual evidence is that Mozart sketched only the first eight bars and Süssmayr completed it after Mozart’s death. (However, if Süssmayr did write the rest of it he did so in music of a quality which escaped him elsewhere, and it begs the question of what he, Mozart and others actually sang around Mozart’s death-bed when, as the biographers tell us, the Lacrimosa was sung.) The other little Mozart transcription is at one remove from the original Ave verum corpus motet – which also dates from the last year of Mozart’s life. Liszt had already incorporated it into a work variously for piano, piano duet, organ or orchestra entitled A la chapelle Sixtine and this version merely adds a cadence to an excerpt from that work. (Liszt did make a more literal version of Mozart’s motet – for organ, S674a.)

We know that Verdi thought highly of Liszt as an orchestral composer, but information about his attitude to Liszt’s Verdi transcriptions is scanty. Liszt certainly had approval from Verdi’s publishers for them, and Ricordi was very proud to issue the pieces with both composers’ names floridly decorated on the title pages. But Liszt’s very personal view of Verdi, especially in the last transcriptions – Aïda, Requiem, Boccanegra – but already evident in the earlier ones, led him often to alter the shape of Verdi’s melodies, and, as in the present case, to produce really quite a different and even more intimate musical shape. (This piece is one of a number which Liszt produced for Ricordi which has alternative passages for performance on a piano which allows mechanical repetition of notes and chords which are held down. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be one of these curiosities in working order, or this disquieting idea could be put to the test.)

By contrast, the two Rossini transcriptions are very close to the originals: the Cujus animam so delighted Liszt that he also arranged it for voice and organ, and even for trombone and organ. The original aria itself has always been popular, despite the occasional humourless critic who disapproves of Rossini’s treatment of sacred texts. La charité is less well known, at any rate as a sacred chorus, but its apparent familiarity stems from a version of the same material at a far greater velocity (in the form of a tarantella) and especially in Benjamin Britten’s orchestration as the finale to his Soirées musicales.

The music of the Viennese composer Adalbert von Goldschmidt (1848–1906) has disappeared pretty well without a trace, but in his day he was respected as a well-to-do amateur whose patronage in Viennese musical life helped many another musician. He was a thorough enthusiast for the new music of the Weimar school, and his once-famous oratorio The Seven Deadly Sins, which appeared in 1876 (shortly before the first performance of ‘The Ring’, with which Goldschmidt was doubtless acquainted) bears many characteristics of late Wagner and Liszt. Hanslick loathed it, which may be taken as a compliment in the light of his opinions of Goldschmidt’s idols. But it must also be said that Goldschmidt’s style bears one or two traits of the semi-professional, and that Liszt’s transcription does its best to elevate the material in a typical act of generous assistance to a younger composer. The Love Scene has many an echo of Tristan in it, whilst Fortune’s (Crystal) Ball seems to be closely related to the Ride of the Valkyries. The bleak ending, side-stepping a comfortable C major finish for octave C sharps is Liszt’s own.

There is a vast literature of Romantic music for men’s chorus, nearly all of which remains unperformed nowadays, the fashion having expired long since. Many beautiful pieces by Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Richard Strauss, among many others, are only found in libraries under a shroud of dust. Mendelssohn’s set of six choruses which make up his Opus 50 contain music every bit as fine as his Lieder. Liszt makes a single piece out of two of them: Wasserfahrt (published in England as ‘Gondola-Song’) is delicately varied and enhanced with a modulatory coda which leads to the Hunter’s Farewell – Jäger Abschied, a work originally accompanied by brass instruments – which is put through its paces in suitably rousing style.

Weber’s simple and moving Lullaby is the basis for a set of the most delicate variations. It is strange that Liszt wrote so few formal sets of variations when the techniques of variation form such a staple of his art, and similarly strange that when, as here, he writes a real set of variations he eschews thus to entitle them; many of his transcriptions, especially from songs, are bona fide sets of variations, and had they been published as such might have avoided the customary contumely which was long applied to transcriptions of all sorts. But the Lyre and Sword transcription is of another kind: Liszt takes three of Weber’s six unaccompanied choruses and makes a miniature symphonic poem of them. The Heroïde in this new form becomes grandly heroic in a style that even calls Chopin to mind. The flourish at the end of the introduction is certainly a recollection of that composer’s F sharp minor Polonaise. Liszt extends all of Weber’s ideas and links all the choruses together in a convincing triptych – of Sword-Song, with Liszt’s extra dotted rhythmic accompaniment, a passionately arpeggiated Prayer before the battle and a barnstorming Lützow’s Wild Hunt – which would make a worthy candidate for revival on the recital platform.

Hummel’s famous Septets (the present work, and the ‘Military’ Septet) are, with no disrespect, piano works with instrumental backing. The D minor work was also issued as a piano quintet, and it was Liszt’s edition of the piano part for both instrumentations that led to the version recorded here. In fact, the published piano transcription and the piano part for the chamber work are printed as one, with a bewildering array of passages in small type, and dozens of alternative readings for when the ‘instrumental accompaniment’ is absent, or for when passages are repeated. So Liszt’s task in transcribing this work was of quite a different order from the Beethoven Septet transcription. But clearly this is a bar-for-bar account of Hummel’s work in which Hummel’s piano part forms the basis of the whole. The opening Allegro sounds in Liszt’s hands like the finest sonata allegro that Hummel never quite got around to writing himself, and Liszt’s technical wizardry complements Hummel’s own. And, like Mendelssohn’s fleetness of foot, Hummel’s metronome marks throughout make no allowances for any want of agility. What Hummel had in mind by including the word ‘menuetto’ in the title of the second movement can only be the object of wry speculation. His piano part leaps and decorates at a furious pace, and Liszt’s adroit addition of the instrumental parts, which have a life of their own in this movement, makes this a real test of one’s knowledge of keyboard geography. Even the Alternativo has logistical tricks to it. The variations are surely modelled upon those in the Beethoven Septet – the similarities of the themes and the figuration are uncanny – and Liszt is able to reorganize the texture by taking many passages where Hummel writes for the hands an octave apart into a single line and accommodating the other six parts amongst the spare fingers. The finale, which is commonly heard at a much slower rate than Hummel’s wishfully-thought 108 semibreves to the minute, combines elements of quick march and moto perpetuo in triplets in an almost relentless headlong rush, complete with fugal episodes, hindered only by the delightful lyricism of the second theme which is itself immediately subsumed in the rapid flow. Liszt does his level best to omit nothing, but the consequent tallness of the performing order has prevented this splendid work from obtaining anything like the popularity it deserves.